LCSR Seminar: Malcolm MacIver

Description

Malcolm MacIver, a group leader of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems at Northwestern University, will give a talk titled "Biological Planning Deciphered via AI Algorithms and Robot-Animal Competition in Partially Observable Environments" for the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics.

MacIver also has a joint appointment between the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering as well as courtesy appointments in the departments of Neurobiology and Computer Science.

The link to attend the virtual lecture is on the LCSR website.

Abstract:

Planning, the ability to imagine different futures and select one assessed to have high value, is one of the most vaunted of animal capacities. As such it has been a central target of artificial intelligence work from the origins of that field, in addition to being a focus of neuroscience and cognitive science. These separate and sometimes synergistic traditions are combined in our new work exploring the origin and mechanics of planning in animals. We will show how mammals evade autonomous robot "predators" in complex large arenas. We have discovered that depending on the arrangement and density of barriers to vision, animals appear to carefully manage their uncertainty about the predator's location in order to reach their goal. Their behavior appears unlikely to be driven by cached responses that were successful in the past, but rather based on planning during brief pauses over which they peek at the hidden robot adversary that is looking for them. After peeking, they re-route to avoid the predator.